I misread the instructions for this week. I thought I had to add a blog about technology that intersects me, not interests me. hmmm....technology that intersects me could have been an easier topic too!!
what really interests me at the moment is whether natural language searching will ever be sophisticated and reliable enough to replace controlled vocabularies. Pretty nerdy, hey? Stick with me though...
Geeks around the world are currently working on programming computers to construct meaningful subject headings, keywords, terms that describe text as well as humans could. Sounds futuristic? Well, yes it was in the sixties when this all began. Sound scary? Well, why not have machines do the grunt work and let the librarians advance to a higher level of duty.
So instead of humans adding say, terms from a thesaurus, to a full text record in a database a computer program will 'read' a journal article and apply terms to it that it 'thinks' are descriptive of the important concepts covered.
When the database is searched, the user inputs in their search terms in natural language! the computer (or possibly cylons by then) interprets the natural language, searches the database for terms that match and feeds them back to the user. it's like google, only better, more accurate, more ontologically sound, you know.
This way people don't need to remember subject headings, thesaurus terms, synyonyms, homographs, etc.
Is that technological enough for you? yeah, web2.0 is fun and all but it still feels like play not work. i'm still waiting for the day that google goes live with intelligence.
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